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A Drink in Search of a Frosty Mug

TWO SIPS In Glendale, Wis., the Sprecher company makes both root beer and the other kind.Credit
Tim Wright/Sprecher Brewing Company

WHAT is it about root beer?

No soft drink incites the passions the way root beer does. People love it or they hate it, but they don’t ignore it. Few sodas have the mystique of a frosty mug of root beer.

Nobody chugs root beers mindlessly the way a reformed smoker downs Diet Cokes. Instead, people dissect them and analyze them. They debate the merits. They break down the formula, if they can. They might even try to make root beer themselves.

In the United States, hundreds of root beers are brewed by soda makers large and small. The sheer quantity and diversity of root beers dwarfs the quantity and diversity of any other soda, although the actual volume is but a trickle compared with the ocean of cola pumped out by the corporate giants that rule the global soda market.

I almost never write about soft drinks, and I almost never drink soda. If I do, though, it’s usually root beer. I love it and always have. I have nostalgic memories of root beer floats — what other genre of soda lends its name to an ice cream drink? — and of road-trip pit stops at A & W root beer stands.

That’s why, when it was suggested that the tasting panel review a soft drink, I seized on root beer. Where else short of lemonade would we be able to find so much variety and home-brew creativity? To join me and Florence Fabricant, I immediately thought of two well-known root beer lovers, but Snoopy and the Red Baron were unavailable. So we happily settled for our Dining section colleagues, Julia Moskin and Kim Severson.

We tasted 25 different root beers, not from frosty mugs but in our usual wine glasses. This was a clinical environment, after all, a time for analysis and debate. Frosty mugs? We don’t need no stinkin’ frosty mugs!

Whew. Too much root beer can make a man mean. As it was, the 25 root beers in our selection represented a mere sliver of the number available, especially if you include root beer’s close kin, birch beer and sarsaparilla, and the myriad diet versions. Why, at Anthony Schorr’s www.rootbeerbarrel.com, perhaps the leading root beer Web site, 261 root beers are reviewed, along with 37 birch beers, 36 sarsaparillas and 37 diet sodas. Many of these root beers are available only locally or regionally, and we restricted our selections to what we could buy in New York City stores or order online.

While tasting only 25 we learned a lot. For instance, we had not considered the importance of how the sodas were sweetened, or just how sweet they would be. Sweetness dominated, and it led us to think that the best way to enjoy root beer is as cold as possible.

“There’s a reason for the frosty mug,” Julia pointed out. “It blunts the sweetness and you can taste other things more.”

Again with the frosty mugs? Enough, already.

Now, it’s a given among soda connoisseurs that high-fructose corn syrup, the industrial sweetener of choice, is the devil in disguise. That’s why Coca-Cola lovers prize bottles from Mexico, where cane sugar is still used. That’s why many root beer producers, especially the noncorporate ones, use cane sugar and other choices, like honey, maple syrup, brown sugar or molasses.

Nonetheless, 5 of our top 10 used corn syrup. Three of them are corporate products — Dr. Brown’s is owned by Pepsico, while IBC and Stewart’s are part of the Dr Pepper Snapple Group (along with A & W and Hires).

Our No. 1 root beer, from Sprecher in Wisconsin, a wonderfully balanced and complex brew, uses a combination of corn syrup and honey, while our No. 2, the restrained and flavorful IBC, uses only corn syrup. So even with the importance of the sweetener, something more is at play with root beers.

For me, it was the integration and balance of flavors, which raises the question of what exactly root beer is, anyway. Originally, root beers were more like herbal teas, bitter infusions of roots, vines, herbs and spices, including sarsaparilla, sassafras and licorice. Nowadays, the basic components include anise, wintergreen and vanilla, with the addition, perhaps, of flavors like ginger, cloves and mint. At times, the tasting felt almost like analyzing a medicine cabinet, and indeed, one of the components of the IBC aroma was described by a taster as liniment, no doubt from wintergreen.

It’s this odd combination of ingredients that makes root beer a polarizing flavor, like coconut or mushrooms.

“Some people love it, and others think it’s dreadful,” said Gail Vance Civille, the president of Sensory Spectrum, a consulting firm in New Providence, N.J., that evaluates how people perceive aromas and flavors.

Ms. Civille suggests that the reason so many people go into the root beer business is that there is ample room for self-expression. Flavors like orange and black cherry are cut and dried. Colas are so dominated by Coke and Pepsi that other producers have to conform. But root beer? “Nobody has put their stake in the ground with root beer and said, this is what it is,” she said.

With the variety of possible ingredients and proportions, my bottom line was that the flavors had to be balanced and integrated into a root beer ensemble without outlying notes. And too often, something stuck out. Most often, the root beers we didn’t like were dominated by sweetener or by vanilla.

Photo

A NICE NOSE? Ryan Trirett tastes Sea Dog root beer, made by the Shipyard Brewing Company in Maine.Credit
Stacey Cramp for The New York Times

My colleagues had other concerns. Florence felt strongly about the overbearing sweetness while Kim was disappointed that so few root beers had the thick, creamy heads that she remembered. “I thought I knew root beer,” she sighed.

If anyone does know root beer, it would have to be Mr. Schorr. “Creaminess is important,” he said. “I like the sweeter root beers, though a lot of people disagree with me.”

Speaking of sweetness, our No. 8 root beer, the cinnamon- and ginger-inflected Gale’s from Illinois, is made by Gale Gand, executive pastry chef and a partner at Osteria di Tramonto, Tramonto’s Steak & Seafood and Tru in the Chicago area.

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She started making her own root beer in the early 1990s after she moved to England and found herself missing it. Her grandfather had made root beer, and she attributes the do-it-yourself root beer ethos to the fact that root beer extract has always been available for home brewing. Incidentally, Ms. Gand says she has been using corn syrup at the behest of her bottler but is now switching to cane sugar.

Florence and I were on opposite sides of several root beers. Her favorite was Dr. Brown’s, which I thought lacked root beer character, while I was the biggest advocate of Fitz’s, which she thoroughly disliked. Some big names did not make our list. We felt Virgil’s, once a pioneering boutique root beer (now owned by Reed’s), was overly sweet, as was Boylan’s, while Route Beer 66 was dominated by vanilla. Dad’s and A & W, two fine old root beer names, didn’t measure up.

Of course, 25 is too small a sample to say who makes the best root beer. Mr. Schorr, whose first and middle initials are presciently A. W., has a wish list posted on his Web site for 34 that he hasn’t tasted.

“I try to have a couple of frosty mugs in the freezer at all times,” he told me.

Ratings, from zero to four stars, reflect the panel’s reaction to the root beers, which were tasted with names concealed. The sodas represent a selection generally available in good retail shops and on the Internet.